PARSHAS VAYERA   (Montreal CA / Holocaust Museum)

Good Shabbos.   This past Tuesday, Goldie’s nephew got married in Montreal Canada.  I attended high school in the Yeshiva in Montreal and had not been back in over 30 years.  So it was with a great sense of enthusiasm that I accompanied Goldie there to see the city and attend the wedding. 

Montreal has evolved into a beautiful modern city and the Jewish community has grown manifold. The wedding was beautiful but what impressed me most was the vibrancy of the Jewish community.  I saw hundreds upon hundreds of boys and girls studying in the yeshivos and Jewish Dayschools. At the minyon which I attended on a regular Wednesday morning, there were about 60 people at my minyon.  But there were also about 50 at the minyan that finished moments before we started, and about another 50 ready to daven in the next minyon as we were finishing up.  In the Yeshiva building where I was davening, there are minyons every 45 minutes from 6:30 to 10am and that is just one shul.  There had to be at least 10 orthodox shuls with minyons throughout the community. 

There were at about a dozen different bakeries and restaurants and places to eat that were strictly kosher.  I was there for less than 48 hours, but in that time I had kosher Chinese, kosher pizza, great kosher donuts and a spicy kosher sandwich in the lobby Montreal Holocaust Museum.  

Montreal is home to the third largest Holocaust Survivor Community in the world.  By 1980 there were over 30,000 Holocaust Survivors living there.  All of the stories and testimonies depicted in the films in their Holocaust Museum were gathered from survivors living in Montreal. 

There are three sections of the museum. The first deals with pre war Europe from the end of the First World War to the beginning of World War II.  It shows the variance of Jewish life in Europe during that time and deals with the rise of Socialism, Nazism, and Anti Semitism.  The next section deals with Europe during the War from 1939 to 1945.  The third section is a Memorial Room with 6 candles lit for the 6 million Jews who were murdered, an urn of ashes from the Auschwitz death camp, and an eternal flame symbolizing the continuity of Judaism.   

The Museum highlighted the fact that during the worst of times, our people always maintained faith and hope.  Even in the ghettos - there were marriages, births, and holiday observances.  Among the articles on display, is a booklet in the shape of a heart, made by a group of Jewish women for another woman on her birthday with messages of goodwill and hope. 

There are no words evil enough to depict what our people endured at the hands of the Nazis. Six million Jews, 2/3 of all the Jews of Europe, 1/3 of all Jews worldwide - murdered - for one reason and one reason only. Because they were Jews. To our enemies, it didn’t matter if the Jew was the most assimilated or the most religious. A Jew was a Jew and deserved to be killed.

Our enemies were able to rip off beards, torch skin, brand arms, pull teeth, and gas bodies. But they were not able to penetrate minds, hearts and souls.  The Nazis were highly successful in killing Jews, but were dismal failures at quenching the Jewish spirit.  

It is remarkable that Jews clung to Torah even in those darkest of days.  In the ghettos, in the concentration camps, in the midst of all of the death and persecution, they continued to pose questions to their Rabbis and teachers. 

• A woman in the ghetto who had just given birth wanted to know if she could circumcise her newborn baby boy before the eighth day, since she feared he would not live even a week. This loving mother wanted to ensure that at least he die a circumcised Jew.
• A very sick man who was told that he was too weak to fast Yom Kippur and thus forbidden to do so according to Torah law, begged to know if he could still refrain from eating. Though he had been completely non-observant his entire life, he wanted to die knowing he had fasted on his final Yom Kippur.
• A father needed to know if he was permitted to save his only son, slated for certain death, through bribery, when he knew that if his child was saved, another innocent child would be taken in his place.
• A mother asked if she could painlessly kill her own baby, since the next day they were coming to take all the children, and would either throw her three-month-old daughter off a rooftop or directly into the fire.

Our enemies tried to make us untermenschen–sub-humans. They tried to annihilate us, to rid the world forever of the Jews. But they did not know who they were dealing with. They did not know what it means to be a Jew.  For the Jew is not one who merely strives to be human. The Jew is one who strives to be G-dly. And that can never, ever, be destroyed.

In this week’s portion, Abraham asks: “Shall the Judge of all the earth not do justice?” (Genesis 18:25)  Even Moshe questioned G-d and asked: “Why do the righteous suffer and the wicked prosper?”

Indeed, they asked these questions but equally important is the fact, that while asking, they never lost faith.  For the question itself is based on a belief in G-d performing justice.  We may not understand why G-d allows the world to function in the way He does, but we still maintain our faith that it is so. 

To those who argued that the Holocaust disproves the existence of G-d, I think the opposite lesson is more reasonable.  The holocaust teaches that society cannot be based on human based morality.  In pre-war Europe, it was the German people who epitomized culture, scientific advance and philosophic morality. Yet these were the very people who perpetrated the most vile atrocities known to human history!

If nothing else, the Holocaust has taught us that a moral and civilized existence is possible only through the belief in and the acceptance of the ultimate Divine authority. The command, “Thou shalt not kill”, must be premised on “I am the L-rd your G-d.”

In my mind, I juxtaposed the atrocities which the Montreal Museum depicted as the Nazis sought to destroy all vestiges of Judaism to the minyons and the kosher restaurants and the thousands of beautiful Yiddishe kinderlach studying Torah in the Montreal Yeshivos. More than anything else, it is these children that testify to our triumph over our enemies. 

We should memorialize the lives of those who were killed in the Holocaust as they do in Montreal - by living a more committed and Jewish live.  May G-d soon send the Moshiach and usher in the era of peace and brotherhood among all the nations of the world, and the time when the knowledge of G-d will cover the world like water covers the ocean’s bed, and let us say, Amain.